The shelves of this bookstore hold a wide array of titles containing ideas as diverse as the world in which we live. We believe that it is in the best interest of our community and democratic society for ideas of all kinds to be available to interested individuals, regardless of what our own tastes may be. In that spirit, we believe that censorship—whether by individuals, special interests groups, or government—damages our society.

We also believe that it is our responsibility to you, and to the First Amendment, to respect the privacy of your choice of books, magazines and other materials. We will not sell information identifying your purchases to a third party without your permission or otherwise disclose it to anyone, including the government, on our own initiative.

August 12, 2005

US vs. Councilman is back on track. The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that an ISP reading its customers' mail can be tried on federal criminal charges. (More from Yahoo/AP, and Declan McCullough of News.com).

Here's how it happened:

In 1998, Interloc (the first major Internet-based listings service) was caught snooping on emails sent by Amazon.com to booksellers using Interloc's ISP business, which provided @interloc.com bookseller email addresses. Alibris, the company that acquired Interloc, quickly pled guilty, and divested itself of the ISP business.

The case continued in 2001 as US vs. Councilman, in which the government tried to prove that a former Interloc VP violated criminal wiretapping laws by having directed the email interceptions. Councilman's lawyers argued that existing federal criminal wiretapping laws did not directly apply, because the filtering did not occur during transmission, but rather, took place while the Amazon.com emails were on the Interloc email server. The District Court judge agreed, and the case was dismissed in 2003.

Yesterday, the Court ruled 5-2 that the Wiretap Act can apply even to email messages temporarily stored during delivery on an email server, allowing the government to move ahead with its original charge, and effectively leaving us back where we were in 2001.

Update: I fixed my mistake and clarified the description, as per Seth's suggestion. Thanks!

Six years ago, Interloc (the predecessor to Alibris, and the first major contemporary listings service) was involved with a case of electronic espionage -- they were caught snooping on emails sent by Amazon.com to booksellers using Interloc's affiliated ISP. As the case unfolded, the young Alibris quickly pled guilty, and divested itself of the businesses involved in the case.

The case continued as US vs. Councilman, in which the government tried to prove that that a former VP of Interloc (not an Alibris employee) violated criminal wiretapping laws by directing the capture of emails from competitors sent to booksellers on Interloc's affiliated ISP.

August 24, 2002

BookFinder.com is in the process of joining the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), a book industry organization working on anti-censorship issues. Although we're technically not booksellers ourselves, we share many of the same concerns as other folks in the industry, and consider it important that we safeguard our users' right to read.

The ABFFE is currently involved in ensuring that those provisions of the USA Patriot Act that give the government the power to investigate Americans' reading habits not be abused. They've been trying to raise awareness of the issue, and recently filed a Freedom of Information request with the Justice Department to force it to disclose the extent to which these new powers have been used to monitor American bookstores, libraries, and newspapers.